LA one weekend...

...New York the next...

... and DC in between

What a glamourous, jet-set life I live... NOT!!!

But it is definitely an exciting week for me! :-)

Juli is coming!

Tomorrow, my boo is coming to visit me and I couldn't be happier!! She's the first person to visit so she's my favorite friend... for now ;-)

I'm setting up some tours for her here in DC while I'm at work on Friday and then on the weekend we're going to New York City!! I've never ever been to New York and I can hardly wait. I've always dreamed of going to New York at Christmastime and now it's coming true. What could be better?? Besides Disneyland at Christmastime... but I get to do that too!

We're going to go to Rockefeller Center for iceskating and to see Christmas tree, to Central Park, to 5th Avenue, to Ground Zero, to the Empire State Building, to Times Square, and who knows where else!! I'm praying that it snows, that would just make my joy complete.

Here's a funny picture of Juli and I (she's impersonating Stuart from Mad TV):

Here's a better one (this was such a fun night):

We're going to have SO MUCH FUN!!!

Congratulations Helio!!

Dancing With The Stars Season 5 Champion:

!! Helio Castroneves!!

I don't recommend...

taking a red-eye flight from the West to the East Coast. We left LA at 10:45 p.m. and landed in DC at 6:30 a.m., which felt like 3:30 a.m. for us. We hit traffic so we barely had time to get to our apartment, check on our kittens, get dressed and then hop back in the car to drive to work. As you can imagine, I'm like a zombie at my desk today and I'm sucking down venti lattes to stay awake.


We slept the entire time on the airplane, but we're still completely exhausted. I can't wait to get home tonight and fall straight into bed!! But it was TOTALLY worth it :-)

Happy Thanksgiving Eve!

In honor of this special holiday, my office closes at noon... which means that I only have to work for 3 hours today! YESSS!!! And the best part is that I get paid for all of today. In fact, although I will not be back to work until Tuesday, I will still get paid for those 3 1/2 days!! Working for the goverment certainly has its perks :-)

Last night, Brandon and I went shopping for Christmas decorations. We bought a wreath, a candle holder with garland and red berries, a cute stuffed snowman, a nativity scene, a fake pointsettia, stockings, and some ornaments for our tree. I LOVE Christmas!!! Also, tomorrow marks the start of the Christmas season. I've been ready and waiting for it for months now.

After shopping, we went home and drank hot chocolate and played Monopoly, which isn't that much fun with only two people, and is even less fun when your opponent has two good monopolies and all you have is Mediterranean and Baltic, ugh. We also watched the end of Dancing with the Stars results show... sorry Jenny, you were good but not good enough. I am now a full-fledged Helio fan. He did soooo good on Monday, he deserves to win and I'll be voting for him!!

We leave tomorrow morning for California and I'm so excited I might pee my pants!! It's my favorite time of the year and I get to spend it with my favorite people in the world. Thank you Jesus for all of life's blessings for which I am so incredibly undeserving but which you have given me anyways out of love and grace!!

I Heart Thanksgiving

Here's why I'm excited for Thanksgiving:


1. Food - Enough Said.




2. Family - Rachel got home from Europe yesterday!!! I CANNOT WAIT to see my family!




3. Fun - Holidays are nothing but fun with your family. I think this picture was actually taken at Christmas last year, but it's the same difference. We have fun no matter what.

Guess What!

I'm

Going

HOME

For

THANKSGIVING

*************************************

*Praise the Lord for dirt cheap, last minute flights!*

Today's the Day...

...that the National Thanksgiving Turkey received a presidential “pardon”. The ceremony took place on the South Lawn of the White House where President Bush made some cheesy turkey jokes and then pardoned the national turkey. This presidential pardon means that the lucky bird will not be eaten for Thanksgiving dinner! The 2007 National Thanksgiving Turkey and its alternate are from Dubois, Indiana and were driven to DC for the ceremony. American citizens voted to name the turkeys May and Flower in a poll on the White House website; Wish and Bone came in a close second. After the presentation, the turkey will be flown first class to Disney World in Orlando, where he will be the grand marshal of Disney’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

What a lucky turkey!! One minute he’s about to be dinner for the leader of the free world, the next he’s freed and off to Disney World to celebrate Thanksgiving in style!!

"The names May and Flower are certainly better than the names the vice president suggested, which was 'lunch' and 'dinner.'" - Bush

Top 20 Christmas Movies... According to ME!!!

I’ve rated the best Christmas movies of all time for you, all you have to do is watch them!! My advice: Get started Thanksgiving Day so that you have time to re-watch your favorites before Christmas comes!! I usually re-watch the top 10 or 12 at least twice every year :-)

20. The Polar Express
19. Jingle All the Way
18. Mickey’s Christmas Carol
17. A Muppet Christmas Carol
16. It’s a Wonderful Life
15. I’ll Be Home for Christmas (Remember JTT?? He's the star of this one!)
14. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (Claymation!)
13. The Year Without A Santa Claus and Santa Claus is Coming to Town (More Claymation!)
12. The Holiday
11. The Santa Clause
10. Elf
9. Home Alone 2
8. Little Women
7. White Christmas
6. Christmas Vacation
5. A Charlie Brown Christmas
4. Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Classic!)
3. Home Alone (Childhood Favorite)
2. A Christmas Story (Funniest Christmas Movie EVER!!)
1. Love Actually (Most Romantic Christmas Movie)

ENJOY!!!

Looks like a rather blustery day...

The sky today is a crisp blue with a few grayish white clouds up there and there’s a strong wind blowing pretty yellow and orange and red leaves through the air. It’s actually blowing them in circles and swirls up into the air. Every time I see a blustery day like this, I think of Winnie the Pooh and smile. It’s the kind of day that makes you want to put on a plaid coat and some warm boots and go for a walk with the wind blowing through your hair and watch all of the beautiful autumn leaves swirl through the sky. If I owned a plaid coat, that’s exactly what I would do… and I would hum the Blustery Day song too.


Hum dum dum ditty dum

Hum dum dum
Oh the wind is lashing lustily

And the trees are thrashing thrustily

And the leaves are rustling gustily

So it's rather safe to say

That it seems that it may turn out to be

It feels that it will undoubtedly

It looks like a rather blustery day, today

It sounds that it may turn out to be

Feels that it will undoubtedly

Looks like a rather blustery day today

3 Day Weekend!!

Here’s what we did this weekend:

A
Whole
Lot of
NOTHING!!!

In other news, I finally got a heater for my desk at work. My professional wardrobe has suddenly doubled now that I can wear skirts again. Also, I don’t have to spend 8 hours each day thinking about how cold I am… now I get to spend those 8 hours thinking about how bored I am.

And I also finally went to the doctor’s office yesterday. Since my sinus infection is now going on week 6, I figured it was about time I did something to end it. I’ve got some wonderful antibiotics that made me feel nauseous at first and then extremely exhausted yesterday. But now they seem to be working, I can already feel some of the pressure/mucus behind my eyes and cheekbones begin to drain. Ok… waaayyy too much information. I’m done.

Uh Oh....

*The price of oil is $98 a barrel and rising!!

*Home foreclosure rates have doubled since last year and are only expected to get worse as interest rates continue to rise on adjustable-rate mortgages.

*The stock market has been steadily dropping for a few weeks now.

*The dollar is at a record low against the euro and at the lowest exchange rate in over 50 years against the pound and the Canadian dollar.

*Medicare already pays out more than it takes in and Social Security will begin to in 2017 – that’s less than 10 years from now!! Actually funding Social Security would require a 16% increase in payroll taxes (from you and I) and a 13% cut in benefits. And funding Medicare would require a 122% payroll tax hike and a 51% reduction in spending- just for hospital care.

*Although my generation pays into the system, we won’t be getting any benefits from it. Social Security will be bankrupt about 10 years before we are even eligible for benefits and Medicare’s hospital insurance fund will be bankrupt just 12 years from now.

*In 1945, there were 42 people paying into Social Security for every retiree, today there are only 3. By 2030, every single American working couple will have their own retiree to support!!

*The national debt just hit $9 trillion yesterday and continues to increase $1.44 billion a day!! This means that the federal government owes $29, 947.44 for every single American citizen!!



Now, I don’t know a whole lot about finances, but even my simple mind can see that we have a big problem on our hands.

Dancing With The Stars

So, I don’t know if anybody watched Dancing with the Stars last night, but it wasn’t quite as monumental as last week when poor Sabrina was wrongly voted off - she should have won the whole thing!! Jane Seymour was voted off last night which is a little sad because she was really good, especially for her age, but she just can’t cut it with the rest of the competition. But let me just say that I hope I look half as good as Jane does when I’m 56!!! I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman has a better body at 56 than I do at 22, and she’s had like 6 kids!! I guess I better do something about that, huh? Well anyways, she did a great job and was out there jiving along with the rest of the 20-year-old stars. Way to go Jane!!!

I can’t decide who I want to win now that Sabrina’s gone. I think Mel B. a.k.a. Scary Spice is probably the best of everybody left, but she’s kind of, well, scary. Her laugh is freaky and that matrix costume she had on last night was even worse. I think my new favorite is either Jenny Garth because she’s so sweet and I still enjoy watching 90210 re-runs on random cable channels every now and then, or Helio because I like his smile and his partner Julianne, or maybe Cameron because he’s getting really good and he’s always fun to watch (especially his Superman dance).

After last week though, I think we all know that anything could happen and anyone could win. But I’ll be glued to my screen every Monday and Tuesday to find out!!

And on a much sadder note, The Office has stopped filming because of the writer’s strike in Hollywood. Apparently, Steve Carell refuses to cross the picket lines to film the already written scripts. Bummer!!! I hope they end the strike soon so that there won’t have to be any Office re-runs. Brandon and I won’t know what to do with ourselves on Thursday nights. Oh, and this probably makes it sound like we’re TV addicts, but that’s far from the case. If anything, it’s more like we’re church addicts because we spend waaayyy more time there than watching television.

Hiking

We went hiking on Saturday, but it took me until today to get the pictures because our internet at the apartment hasn’t worked for a few days. We mooch off of our neighbor’s wireless connection, so sometimes it doesn’t work and there’s really nothing we can do about it. Anyways, back to hiking. We went with a group of people from church up to the Shenandoah mountains. They’re small mountains compared to the Cascades, but they still made for a very challenging hike. We hiked up one specific mountain called Old Rag – but I have no idea why it’s named Old Rag. I wonder who decided to name a mountain Old Rag?? Why not something majestic or tough sounding?? Oh well, it’s called Old Rag and, like our fickle wireless connection, there’s nothing I can do about it. We left at 6:30 and had to drive for an hour and a half to get there. It was a beautiful drive, but I don’t have any pictures of the Virginia countryside because somebody – I won’t say who, but I bet you can guess – forgot to charge the camera even though I specifically asked him the night before if it was charged and he assured me it was. So we had to save our pictures for the hike and the view from the top.


We hiked 3.5 miles up the mountain and it was hard!! The first part wasn’t bad because it was just switchbacks up the base of the mountain, but it kept getting steeper and steeper the farther we went. At the end of this, I thought we had reached the top, but we hadn’t. We then had to do something called a “rock scramble,” which apparently is jumping from rock to rock at the top of a steep mountain. They were more like boulders actually and at times we had to practically scale the boulders and crawl through narrow cracks in between them. This took forever but when finally reached the summit… there was a bagpiper up there!!! He was standing of the tallest boulder and piping away. Renee, I thought of you when I saw this - though I don’t know why. We ate our lunches at the top and then began hiking 4.5 miles down, which was obviously much easier than going up the mountain.

On the way home, we stopped at an amazing milkshake stand. We had seen it on the way to the mountain and Brandon couldn’t get it out of his head, so we heard about his craving for a chocolate milkshake repeatedly over the next 8 hours until he finally got one. He also tried to order two chocolate milkshakes, but I wouldn’t allow it, so he drank half of mine. Ooohh, and some other highlights: we saw a man flying a kite at the top of the mountain which he lost control of and crashed into a family enjoying their lunch and on the way up we passed about 15 Amish schoolgirls who were hiking in their homemade dresses. Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures of either of those unforgettable events, but here are the few pictures I do have.

This is the view from the summit

... and the bagpiper of course!!

And here's one random picture of my haircut so that you all can finally see it.

I had alot more pictures from hiking, but Brandon's computer won't let me post sideways pictures for some reason. Whoever said Macs are better than PC's, well I think they're crazy. I don't see what's so great about Macs.

Psalm 16:8-11

I have set the LORD always before me;

because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.
Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices;

my flesh also dwells secure.

For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol,

or let your holy one see corruption.
You make known to me the path of life;

in your presence there is fullness of joy;

at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

When it rains... it pours

Maybe this is superstitious, but I swear that when one thing goes wrong in my life, it suddenly seems as if everything is going wrong. My grandpa died on Tuesday, then on Wednesday afternoon my grandmother (his ex-wife) was finally properly diagnosed, but it wasn’t a good diagnosis. Two years ago she began to get some symptoms like shaky hands, trouble gripping things, and slurred speech. The doctor at the time told her that she had just had a mild stroke and gave her some medicine and sent her home. But ever since then it’s gotten progressively worse, and she now can’t walk and has a lot of trouble talking and swallowing. The doctors kept switching up her medicines and telling her that it shouldn’t get any worse, but it did. Finally, my Mom took her to a specialist clinic and she got to see a neurologist. The neurologist diagnosed her with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy which is a very rare, degenerative disease. It’s related to Parkinson’s Disease but is much worse. It shuts down the person’s body functions one by one. But the worst part is that it took them over 2 years to diagnose it properly so the disease is already fairly advanced and during the past 2 months, the disease has progressed even more rapidly. My grandma was fine at our wedding but has lost a lot of abilities lately.

Yesterday, my grandma had surgery to have a feeding tube put into her stomach because soon she won’t be able to eat any longer. This is supposed to be a good step because it will improve her quality of life and ensure that she gets properly nourished and reduces the risk of food or liquid ending up in her lungs, which could kill her. It looks as if I’ll be flying home for a couple days sometime within the next few weeks. I’m hoping to wait until Thanksgiving because Rachel will be home and I’ll be able to spend a few extra days at home with my family too. My Mom is obviously taking this pretty hard and I’m anxious to get home to see her. If you all could please pray for my family, we would really appreciate it. And please pray that I can find a cheap plane ticket because I’d rather not spend my entire paycheck, but I will because at this point, I just want to go home more than anything.